Even though it’s been 120 years since the temporary city full of innovation and cultural marvels was erected in Forest Park, St. Louis still loves to talk about its World Fair. Its legacy is ever present—see: The Saint Louis Art Museum, World’s Fair Pavilion, World’s Fair Donuts—but complicated.

Beyond the elementary-education version of events, with its ingenious ice cream cone and ridiculous marathon, there were complex dynamics at work. While the fair was beautiful and impressive, it also brought pain and human exploitation. The Missouri History Museum’s 1904 World’s Fair exhibit, opening April 27, will be a comprehensive look at the event through new and different perspectives.

Public historian Adam Kloppe has been working on 1904 World’s Fair for about five years, gathering stories and artifacts, crafting the exhibition gallery, and developing new media for the space. The exhibit’s previous iteration was on display for 20 years, and the plan is for the reimagined space—featuring a rotating themed gallery, an enormous scale model of the fair, informative overhead projections, and other new elements—to last at least until 2030.

“Once we knew the old exhibit was coming down, we knew we wanted to update the content, but we didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” says Kloppe. “We wanted to take that experience of what worked and what didn’t work about the old gallery and let it inform this space.”

That’s meant bringing in outside voices—Filipino American artist Ria Unson, African American scholar Linda Nance, and author Patrick Murphy—to help tell a more nuanced story of the fair. The gallery is a space to both celebrate the fair and its legacy and to examine its inequities and injustices. Kloppe says that’s the key.

“It can be a difficult thing, but what we find is that people are hungry for that,” says Kloppe. “People want to grapple with history. They want to get in the weeds, and we view the museum as the space where you can have those kinds of conversations and explorations in a civil way.”
The Missouri History Museum’s reimagined 1904 World’s Fair exhibit opens April 27 (stlmag.com)